


Unspoken Experiences

by samariumwriting



Series: Trans Claude AU [10]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Fire Emblem: Three Houses Golden Deer Route, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Non-Graphic Descriptions of Violence, Past Child Abuse, Past Violence, Post-Canon, Post-Golden Deer Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses), Post-War, Scars, Spoilers, Trans Claude von Riegan, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-25 10:46:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20722940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: Over Claude's body are marks of a past he doesn't always want to share. Yet, as time goes on, he finds that the wounds of the past don't ache so much and the people who want to know aren't so hostile.-Also featuring: shirtless Claude and a Golden Deer beach trip.





	Unspoken Experiences

**Author's Note:**

> Hello everyone! :) this fic stands, as a whole, on its own, but does reference events from the fic Scraping By in this series. As always, though, if you're interested in more trans Claude content, please consider reading the other fics in this series.
> 
> Minor content warnings for this fic are some references to past violence - it's all well in the past but if you find topics of stabbings or acid attacks difficult then please look after yourself <3
> 
> There are also some spoilers within for Claude's backstory and maybe some tiny plot spoilers for Golden Deer route. Other than all that, please enjoy!

When Claude was a student at the Academy, he’d never taken baths in the bath house with everyone else. It wasn’t like he was shy about the way he looked or anything, he just preferred to call himself a private person. On the off chance that someone actually asked him, he used to say that his naked body was reserved for only the most intimate of encounters. Then he’d follow it up with a wink, a searching gaze, and waltz off while the person was flustered.

It worked pretty well to cover up the fact that Claude, for a very long time, just wasn’t comfortable with other people seeing him naked. There were things about his body that made it significantly more difficult to keep his cards close to his chest when it came to his past.

He didn’t bother to hide that he hadn’t grown up in the easy luxury that a lot of Alliance nobles had. As it turned out, a lot of his classmates understood that; unspoken truths about Marianne’s upbringing, the rumours Lysithea tried to stop getting out...well, it made for an environment where keeping secrets was easy enough, at least. Because everyone had something to hide.

But coming back to the Academy, this time as a base for fighting a war, Claude found that there wasn’t time for all the hiding that he did before. No more bathing at five in the morning when the sun rose to avoid all other possible intrusions - now, the moment he was up and about there was someone who needed a hand with something and Linhardt would probably conduct tactics meetings in the baths if he could (the only difference would be that Claude was getting out of bed while Linhardt was usually about to go to bed).

Normally, he would go in the late evening, and there’d be one or two people he didn’t know personally there, and they didn’t ask questions or even stare. But desperate times called for desperate measures, which led him to that particular bright, chilly evening in the wake of returning to Garreg Mach from Ailell, and possibly the entire army currently wanted to use the baths. Claude included. So if he wanted to use them any time soon, he’d have to go in with quite a few others.

This included his ever concerned former classmates, now the generals of the Alliance army. Who he was now in close quarters with in the baths, baring the literal secrets of his past right in front of them.

Claude was not self conscious by nature, but that didn’t mean he liked this.

It was Ignatz who managed to turn his concerned glances into words first. “Uh, Claude, is the scar on your shoulder just poorly healed from today?” he asked, his own right hand reaching to brush his shoulder as his eyes were fixed on Claude’s.

That would be an easy answer, but Ignatz and Lorenz, whose eyes were also fixed in his direction, were both rather proficient in magic and they’d find out fairly quickly that the wound wasn’t fresh and wouldn’t heal with a faith spell. “No, it’s old,” he said.

“Oh, but it’s such an awful scar!” Ignatz said. “Those must have been really bad burns. I don’t think I’d ever even noticed them before, are they from the last five years?”

“Claude never took his shirt off back then,” Lorenz chipped in. Claude mentally noted that this was something Lorenz had actually noticed. Interesting information that had plenty to unpack about it. And a bath was not the place to do so. “So you wouldn’t know.”

“Huh, you’re right,” Raphael said. Claude hadn’t even been aware that he was listening. “I never noticed that before. It’s a pretty nasty wound, Claude. What kind of battle were you in to get something like that?”

“Oh, it was an accident,” he said with a shrug. Technically true, seeing as the burn in question was meant to affect his face rather than his shoulder. “You know me. Dangerous substances, fooling around.”

“Did someone attack you?” Ignatz asked. Because he was too clever for his own good, apparently, and he’d realised the flaw just as Claude had after the lie left his mouth - when you worked with liquids you didn’t tend to lift them above your head and spill them in a way that left splash burns.

“Yep,” he said. He felt decidedly put on the spot by the whole thing, but these people were his allies. His friends. They wouldn’t abandon him over a handful of scars, explained or not. Maybe it was time that he didn’t keep everything so close to his chest. “I haven’t always been your universally adored, illustrious leader of the Alliance. I tend to start on the wrong foot, you know.”

“I certainly do,” Lorenz said. His eyes were still fixed on the scar. “To attack a child, however...it takes at the very least a certain kind of annoying child to provoke that reaction.”

“Well, I was definitely one of those,” he said with a laugh. It was much easier to deflect this as a joke rather than being up front about how much it had hurt when the woman who used to pat him on the head and give him sweets threw a burning liquid at him and shouted as he ran. It wasn’t relevant to say all that anyway.

Most importantly, it was in the past. He didn’t need to talk about it or even think about it anymore. 

-

Their fight was done, their victory complete, and the monastery was still an absolute mess. It was late summer, so the temperatures were still high, but there was most definitely a job to be done. As such, Claude had been assigned to rubble moving duty with Raphael and Hilda for the afternoon, and none of them were having a particularly fun time of it.

Hilda had given up for a while. “I’m taking a break,” she said, dramatically draping herself over the stairs. She’d said that fifteen minutes ago and hadn’t done anything other than talk and watch since.

On one hand, Claude was a little annoyed, because she definitely had more body strength than he did so the idea that she was less capable than him of doing this was honestly silly. On the other hand, it was really hot for a late summer evening. Half an hour later saw Hilda working with them again, and Raphael stripping his shirt off and discarding it.

The easy action made Claude pause, just for a moment. And then he stopped thinking, because these were his friends and it was really bloody hot under the evening sun. So he pulled off his own light shirt and hung it over the edge of the wall.

To their credit, neither Raphael nor Hilda said a word, though they did stare a little bit. It was equal opportunity staring anyway, because Raphael was bulky beyond belief. Honestly, Claude didn’t quite know how he managed it, considering they’d been at war for over five years.

A short while later, Hilda sat down again. “Come on, Hilda, we’re nearly done,” Claude said, which would be true as long as she helped. Three sets of hands were a whole lot faster than two.

“I’ll trade working for a story, if you like,” she said, leaning back against the wall. “If you don’t want to answer I’ll go and get you burly men some water.”

Claude looked at Raphael, the pile of rubble, and then back at Hilda. “Go on,” he said.

“What’s the scar in the middle of your chest from?” she asked. “It can’t be from the war, because Marianne is such a great healer, but it looks pretty bad.”

Ah, so it was a personal question. That explained the qualifier she’d given of whether or not he wanted to answer it. In the past, Claude would have dismissed a question like that. He would have told Hilda that she could go and get the water, and he would have put his shirt back on.

But he was living at the dawn of a new era for Fódlan and it was one where he hoped that, eventually, no one would have to hide things like this. “It’s from when I was a child,” he said. “I was, I don’t know, eleven? Someone wanted to send a message and they decided to use me to do it. They missed, actually, which tells you the kind of message it was meant to be.

Hilda looked down at the scar tissue and then back up to Claude’s face. “Yeah, I think I get the picture,” she said. At this point, Claude was pretty sure that most of the Golden Deer knew at least a little about the kind of childhood he’d had, but none more than Hilda. She could probably fill in the gaps.

“You sure were pretty lucky when you were a kid, Claude,” Raphael said. “What with the burns and this one. I got a little scraped up sometimes when I was little but nothing like that.”

“Yeah, it was pretty bad actually,” he said. He hadn’t often thought of the word ‘lucky’ to go along with his experience of injury when he was young. That particular attack had been in public; someone had seen him unsupervised at a festival and took their chance. If the attack had happened in private, he probably would have bled out before anyone found him. So yeah, maybe lucky was the word to describe it.

“Does it still hurt?” Hilda asked. He supposed she wouldn’t know - it wasn’t like Fódlan’s nobles often found themselves in situations like that, especially a second child.

“Not anymore,” he said. “It didn’t hurt when it healed, but it hurt a while after when the nerves started to repair. But it was so long ago now, there’s really nothing about it that bothers me.” Honestly, he thought it looked pretty cool, at least he’d always thought that when he was a kid. Because only people who’d been in battles had scars, and that meant he looked just as brave as some of them.

He realised now that the two things were absolutely not the same, and being stabbed in a market square was not the same as pitched battle, but the sentiment remained that it looked like he’d been injured in a much cooler way than he actually had. Though, honestly, thinking about it now, it was still something to be proud of. The marks of a worse time that he’d lived through, and come out the other side.

-

The efficiency of the Golden Deer was, without a doubt, one of the rarest things to witness these days. But it was late summer, and Lysithea had mentioned that it had been years since she’d last swum anywhere.

Two days later, and they were on the northern coast of Daphnel territory, equipped with towels, plenty of food, swimming clothes, and a ball that someone had found in a cupboard somewhere. Claude didn’t quite know where all the organisational skills had come from, but he wasn’t complaining.

It wasn’t exactly warm in the water, but it wasn’t cold out either. Claude was glad, from the moment his toes touched the surf, that there were towels waiting for them back up by the cliffs. The wind would get cold later, for sure.

It turned out that he was very, very out of practise when it came to swimming. Like everything he’d done as a child, Claude had spent a lot of time working on his skills on his own, but as a general rule there weren’t many wide bodies of water in the middle of a city in a country known for arid plains and deserts. That, combined with a general fear of others seeing his body and inadvertently learning things he didn’t want known, meant that he wasn’t the strongest swimmer in the Golden Deer. Not by far.

Leonie was, literally, swimming circles around all of them. “I grew up in a hunting village in the middle of a forest,” she said, her laugh carrying over the sound of the waves. “I swam in lakes and rivers for most of my childhood.”

“I didn’t tend to swim much as a child,” Lorenz said, and Hilda nodded. “But I didn’t really spend my summers outside. My father thought it was ill befitting of a noble to look like he’d been out in the fields.”

“That’s why you’re so pasty,” Raphael said with a chuckle, poking one of Lorenz’s nearly blindingly white shoulders. “Guess you didn’t spend much time outside either, Lysithea?”

“More than Lorenz, for sure,” she said, sounding slightly indignant. “Ordelia territory borders a river, so my parents always liked to take me to the different tributaries so I could swim. It’s good exercise to stay healthy, but you can’t exactly swim in the Airmid when there’s an army across the water.”

“Right again, of course,” Claude said, and Lysithea shot him a look to make sure he didn’t continue what he was saying. Aww. She was no fun. “I don’t think I’ve swum since before I was recognised as heir, honestly.”

“I don’t know how you could not swim regularly when living in Derdriu,” Ignatz said. He was a surprisingly proficient swimmer, though he stayed close to everyone else as he’d left his glasses on the beach (which Claude thought was a little silly, but Ignatz was worried about them floating off). “I know the water’s not as clean over there, but I’ve always swam a lot. Most people do.”

“I did as well,” Raphael said. “I took Maya swimming with me in some of the canals whenever I could. You just have to stay out of trading hours and it’s super safe.”

“I felt out of place,” he admitted. This was not the time to keep all his emotions locked up inside. He had everything he could want now, and he knew that everyone around him was his friend. He didn’t need to hide. It didn’t make it easier to stop hiding, but he could do it. “It wasn’t like I could just put on shorts for swimming and go out like everyone else.”

“Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Raphael said, a sheepish smile on his face. “Sorry, Claude. Well, you can do it now, right? Do fancy nobles do that kind of thing?”

“‘Fancy nobles’ are doing that thing right now,” Hilda said with a laugh, and just like that, the conversation moved on, everyone talking and laughing as they swam in slow circles, never straying too far from the shore just in case. Most of them were fit enough to be strong swimmers, but they always had to be careful.

But Claude’s mind was still stuck on what Raphael had just said. That he’d forgotten that Claude hadn’t always been able to wear what he wanted, hadn’t felt comfortable with other people seeing his body. He’d forgotten.

Something about it made him...happy. Raphael had a big heart, but he was by no means stupid and he had a memory to rival Lysithea’s when it came to facts about his friends. Yet it was so easy to just forget that he’d ever looked a way he didn’t want to.

There’d been no staring today when Claude pulled his shirt off. No one had spared a second glance at the burn scarring across his shoulders or the two left by the incisions across his chest (which was a shame, because Claude had always fancied telling a joke about ‘the great nipple incident of 1185’).

No one cared- no, that wasn’t the right way to think about it. They cared, but they weren’t bothered by the scars of his past, the secrets he’d carried for so many years. It didn’t matter that someone nearly twenty years ago had decided it would be better for everyone if his heart stopped beating.

The past mattered, sure, but not like that, and not to them. And, swimming in idle circles in the late summer sun, Claude found that freeing. Finally, eventually, after all his fighting, all their fighting, the world had moved on.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was heavily based on a request from @kyleenim on twitter, and the scars Claude has in this fic are detailed and drawn in this post: https://kynimdraws.tumblr.com/post/187248716043. She has lots of the good Claude content so please consider checking her work out.
> 
> Anyway, thank you for reading! :) if you enjoyed, please consider leaving a comment here or saying hi on twitter (@samariumwriting), where I also make a tweet every time I write something. If you have any ideas for other trans Claude content you'd like to see me write, please let me know - I only have three prompts left on my list!!
> 
> EDIT: quick note to anyone who may take a glance at the comments. Someone left a transphobic comment on this, so I marked it as spam. Idk if it will show up for other people, if the whole thread got deleted, etc. But if something looks like it doesn't make sense, that's why!


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